It sounds like Oz is in a similar situation to us. Here we have a privatised telco, BT. In fact AFAIK it was the first privatised telco, since Mrs Thatcher started the craze with it. But thats another story.
Anyway, there are a number of smaller telcos who need you to dial prefix codes for long distance, and cable TV companies who also provide phone service and are starting to add cable modems.
On top of this we have Oftel, the telecoms regulator. They are mainly concerned with preventing BT from squashing any of the minnows. Their long-term goal is to nurture the competition to the extent that they no longer have to set BT's prices. Getting new technology into place is a secondary goal.
BT has been experimenting with and promising ADSL for a long time. They are just getting a trial service under way with some ISPs. Those who have it say it works great, but roll-out of the trials has not been terribly successful. BT have just extended the trial time. It is widely suspected that they don't want people to have high speed net access because this will lose BT its lucrative leased line market (ISTR a 64kbit line costs £1,000/month).
Oftel have commanded that BT open up their local loops by the middle of next year. At that point things should start moving.
The First Amendment, being a provision of the U.S. Constitution, is a limitation on the power of government. It has no bearing here.
I am not a lawyer, still less a US constitutional lawyer, but surely this is not true. If the US government is spending money then it has to be used in a constitutionally valid way. I seem to recall that the recent case about school vouchers was decided on this issue: school vouchers were almost all being spent by parents to send their children to religiously based schools. Ergo the government was funding religion, and that is forbidden by the constitution.
If a link that tenuous can be held to be unconstitutional, what would the purchase of censorware for libraries be?
Why is it that every time I see something on Echelon its by Duncan Cambell? Is he really the only journalist interested in this?
I would have thought that these remarks are important enough to have been reported by someone else. There are supposed to have been enough journalists at the press conference.
Can anyone find anything on this subject which is not written by or based entirely upon the writings of Duncan Cambell?
I read on the Novell site (yeah, really unbiased of course) that for LDAP Micro$oft did the opposite of embrace and extend. LDAP has had a bunch of extensions added over the years which have become defacto standard. Lots of clients use these extensions, including Lotus Notes. According to Novell MS LDAP does not include these extensions, so it breaks all the standard clients. Unfortunately I can't now find that page on their site.
We've had the.com landgrab. Now watch out for the TLD landgrab. Everybody will want to own their own TLD, especially if they can charge every megacorp $50 to prevent someone else setting up www.megacorp.sucks,.evil,.blows,.lousy,.stupid,.hateit,.dumb,.cretin,.broken,.costalot,.tacky,... Paul.
I notice that the worst prophecies of the LPF have failed to come to pass. Some years ago Stallman said that software patents make programming a "minefield": that every step has a non-zero probability of blowing you up. But in practice this does not seem to have happened.
Today we have huge amounts of open-source software, but very little of it has been challenged on patent grounds. Even where such issues arise, they usually seem to be known about before the "infringing" software is written. The only minefield case I know of was the GIF patent, and even there the effect on the community was minimal because the owners behaved sensibly.
And in general patent holders will behave sensibly. In theory Megacorp could sue some innocent Joe into eternal insolvency over a single patent. In practice Megacorp knows that they will never recover even their legal fees, and the bad publicity will cost even more. If Joe is making money from the patent then they will want to come to some licensing deal that leaves Joe in business (no point killing the goose that lays the golden eggs), and if Joe is smart he will negotiate coverage by their patent umbrella as part of the deal. And if Joe is writing free software then litigation gains them absolutely nothing.
Yes, there are things that could be done to reform patents in general and software patents in particular, but the sky is not falling down.
So patenting the rifling itself does nothing to promote commerce; indeed, it hinders commerce by keeping other craftsmen from producing the more technologically advanced work.
But there is also the "copyright" theory behind patents: that the patent is also a reward for the investment required to develop rifling. Your hypothetical musket maker might have had the lightbulb moment, but that is then followed by a long period of work to find out how to rifle barrels, how much rifling is necessary, what shape of bullet should be used, and all the other details behind rifle technology. If he knew that his competitors could copy his rifles and bullets at no charge then there would be no incentive to make the investment into discovering all the things that make rifles work.
On the other hand ISTR the "sweat of the brow" theory of patentability has been explicitly rejected. Merely having spent time doing research does not make something patentable. The novelty and non-obviousness are what counts.
I think that if we want to solve the problem with software patents then we are going to have to come up with an incremental fix to the system rather than revolutionary change. If the problem lies in a land-grab which ignores prior art then call for improved review of software patents and a higher hurdle. Ask that guidance be issued to courts on the subject of prior art, making patents easier to overturn (currently there seems to be a judicial bias in favour of patent office decisions). Don't demand that patents as a whole be abolished because it won't happen.
but it is illegal for a store clerk to suggest to you how to do it
To be precise, it is a breach of contract rather than a criminal issue. The police won't arrest the clerk, but if the MPAA gets wind of it then they will sue the clerk's employer, and the employer will fire the clerk.
The record producers would have to make 3 million different CDs
Sorry, I didn't make myself very clear. What I have in mind is that the copy mechanism would embed the watermark. In the case of a mass-produced CD the watermark would be the same for every copy, and would point to Mammoth Music Inc. But if you buy one of these CDs and make a private copy on your home CD burner then the new copy will have a different watermark pointing at you.
On the civil liberties front, this does not require that you register each piece of music in order to be able to play it. However it might require that you register your CD burner. Or the law could subpoena the source of the copy from whoever they caught holding it, and then verify the information by inspecting your equipment.
I say "and equivalents" because I live in the UK. But UK and EU law are likely to incorporate similar anti-copy-protection-evasion measures, if they don't already.
There are two honest sides to this. On the one hand are the copyright owners who have a legitimate goal of reducing illegal copying at all levels. Unless we want to lobby for the total abolition of copyright on everything, I think that copy protection mechanisms are a legitimate goal.
On the other hand we have the consumer who wants to make fair use of purchased material. In the past both law-makers and courts around the world have been broadly supportive of fair use measures. The Sony vs United Media case is the one I've seen cited in the US, and I believe that similar rulings apply over here. For those unfamiliar with it, the court took the view that copyrights are not an absolute form of property, but a form of regulation designed to increase the production of creative works.
The judge in the DeCSS case made reference to this doctrine, but said that Congress should be given very broad lattitude by the courts in making such laws, since they had both the mandate and the information to make good ones. Hence the DMCA stands.
So I think we have to educate our lawmakers here. Acknowledge copy protection technology as a legitimate means to legitimate ends, but emphasise that these schemes give content produces an unprecedented degree of control over the end use of their products. This degree of control was probably not forseen by the lawmakers who voted for DMCA (I don't comment on those who actually wrote the clauses, or the companies who lobbied for it). Hence technological copy control should only be supported by the law where it permits fair use. We can emphasise this by demonstrating copy protection schemes which permit fair use. We are good at technology: that bit should be easy.
The problem with this is that "fair use" is very hard to pin down. The law surrounding it is complicated and varies between juristictions. This means that any copy protection scheme that tries to decide if a particular copy is legitimate before allowing the copy is not going to work. There is simply no way that a piece of software can make that decision.
The only other approach would seem to be some kind of detection after the fact. For instance, if every copy included a watermark of some kind in the encryption then it would be possible to track down the person who made the copy.
This scheme might be criticised on civil liberty grounds: if the government can track down the person who made a copy of something, they can equally track down the person who said something they don't like. But such a scheme would only apply to the copier of a protected work: anything you create yourself would not be watermarked in this way.
Of course there are a few grey areas. Fair use includes litrary criticism and similar excerpting. So what about a political activist who quotes a copy protected news report in the course of saying something the Government doesn't like? The creator of the copy could be tracked down. But for the vast majority of use I think this has to be the way to go.
It puts me strongly in mind of the South Sea bubble. This was the first great stock market bubble and crash in the UK, and AFAIK in the world.
The South Sea Company stock was very popular, and prices went very high. The company had no immediate revenue stream, but once the war with Spain over South America was over the potential for future profit was thought to be huge. Alongside South Sea Comany came other companies hoping to cash in on the boom. The most remarkable was one which was "A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is".
The parallels with the Linux IPO situation are truly remarkable.
BTW, although there are no links here, you can type that phrase into Google for a number of short histories of the SSB.
That is, does one dodgy operation affect the credibility of all?
Not to any significant extent. Everyone knows that money attracts scam artists, so nobody is surprised to find that a few are sniffing around Linux now. This has no effect on the reputation of the rest of the Linux world. In fact it might even enhance it slightly: people have made a point of publicising suspected scams and warning potential investors off. This should increase confidence in the other enterprises.
4)We need to get the ISPs to offer "offshore inshurance," i.e. the ISP is not allowed to shutdown your site, but they are allowed to move it offshore. Ideally, they should upload the content to the offshore site at the first sign of censorship.
Probably won't work, at least not in that form. A UK court recently convicted a man under the Obscene Publications Act for a pr0n site which he created in the UK and then uploaded to servers in the US. The legal theory was that the act of publication occured in the UK because the upload and some downloads were both in the UK, and the physical location of the server was therefore irrelevant. I suspect that judges in other juristictions are going to think in similar ways.
Having said that, for free information the mirror reflex seems to work rather well. As soon as there is a threat of censorship hundreds of people in lots of juristictions grab copies and mirror it. DeCSS has gone this way, and other information will do so. So while it would be nice for anyone anywhere to own a pr0n site, the truth will still be out there mirrored on somebodies server.
Notice the history of Taiwan Semiconductor. The Taiwan government decided that it ought to have a chip maker, and handed Chang $100M to make it happen. Since then the relationship has remained cosy.
Its exactly this kind of crony capitalism that led to the crash of the Tiger Economies. In the UK we dropped the "national champion" approach to industrial policy when Mrs Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, and we are much better off as a result.
The problem with national champions is that they know they are too politically important to be allowed to fail. As a result they don't worry about running up losses because they know the government will bail them out. Sure, they can sometimes be success stories, but frequently they become economic millstones. UK readers who are old enough may remember the old British Leyland car makers. They were the national champions of UK industry during the 60s and 70s. It didn't take the unions there long to cotton on: the government wouldn't close them down or insist on layoffs because of the bad publicity, and hence they could strike for higher pay, shorter hours, or whatever else they wanted with complete disregard for anything else. BL became a byword for industrial strife, and the cars they made were famously bad.
Incidentally, while BL was destroyed by its unions, they are not the only thing that destroys national champions. The management can do just the same. Their primary cash flow comes from the government rather than their customers, and the government will still be there even if the customers go away. Hence their primary goal becomes pleasing the government rather than their customers. This problem is masked during the boom years because the company does not need to make unpopular layoffs, pay cuts or other measures. But when things turn down again, the management concentrate hard on extracting money from the government instead of becoming more competitive.
Remember the film "The Italian Job", a gold heist in Italy where three BL Minis were used as getaway cars? The film studio approached BL and asked if they could have the Minis in exchange for the valuable publicity. The BL middle-management thought about this and then turned them down. The reason was basically ass-covering. Saying "no" was the safe option. Saying "yes" could lead to Questions In Parliment about taxpayers money being wasted giving away cars to film companies. The extra sales that would result from people seeing the Mini as the perfect city car were irrelevant in this calculation.
Sooner or later, Taiwan Semiconductor is going to go the same way as British Leyland.
I am not a lawyer, but I'll have a shot at the patent side of this.
The thing to read in patents is the Claims. Getting a patent is a bit like homesteading a piece of territory used to be: you stake your "Claim", and if nobody else has got it first then its yours.
Imagine how homesteading might have worked if there were no size limits and no need to "prove" the claim (in the sense of exploiting it all). You can stake your claim by putting four pegs in the ground: the perimiter defined by those pegs is your claim. However the claim is only valid if nobody else has put any of their pegs in that area first.
Patent claims work like a series of (mostly) concentric peg claims. Claim 1 pegs out the whole of Arkensas, but you don't really expect to get that one. Claim 2 pegs out the whole of Hazzard County, and you don't really expect to get that one either. Claim 3 pegs out 50 square miles, and you might get that one if you are lucky. Claims 4-6 are the most likely looking homesteads within claim 3, and claim 4 is where you actually start expecting to defend your property.
So, look at the claims on the patent, and figure out which ones are just restatements of prior art. For example in the DVD content scrambling patent, claim 1 pretty much describes any PRNG. Claim 2 probably covers a lot of cryptographic PRNGs (its not my field), and claims 7 and 8 cover the use of a PRNG number stream XORed with the data. So those claims would be covered by prior art and the MPAA is unlikely to contest them. They will concentrate on the later, more specific claims, such as the precise pattern of XORs in the PRNG.
So if I were writing a DVD descrambler routine I would try to come up with an algorithm which evaded the detailed claims, and forget about claims 1, 2, 7 & 8, and any others with textbook prior art. If you could show a standard textbook as prior art then I would expect the suit to be declared vexatious. But IANAL, of course.
This is documented in "The Odessy Files" by Clarke and Peter Hyams (the director of 2010). During the making of the film they corresponded by a primitve form of email and discussed a number of technical alternatives for the Jupiter Aerobraking sequence. Clarke originally wrote about a solid ablative heat shield for the Leonov. Hyams spent quite a lot of time looking into how the Jupiter sequences ought to look (e.g. the fluid dynamics for simulating the Jovian atmosphere), and IIRC it was he who read about the "ballute" as the inflatable heat shield was known. Or maybe a NASA scientist told him about it.
Yup, go for Terry Pratchett. He is very popular in the UK, but has little penetration in the US. If you like Douglas Adams, you will like TP.
The early books are much less rich than the later ones, so don't give The Colour of Magic as a first book. Instead try any of Mort, Wierd Sisters or Guards Guards. Also don't forget his non diskworld books, especially the "Johnny" books and the Gnomes trilogy (aka "The Bromeliad"), which are aimed at younger readers.
Sorry to follow up to my own post, but it seems that the CSS scrambling algorithm is in fact patented. This means that it is not a trade secret (although the keys are), but using DeCSS probably puts you in violation of the patent.
Conceeded. Patent 5,917,914 appears to describe the scrambling algorithm. At least, it describes a scrambling algorithm. I haven't checked to see if it is the converse to DeCSS.
Assuming that this algorithm is the real CSS one, then trade secret protection does not apply to it, and DeCSS can be distributed as long as it does not include any secret keys, and of course subject to any relevant patent laws.
Interesting. A search for "Digital video disk" at the USPTO turned up Patent 5,883,958.
However this patent does not describe the CSS scrambling algorithm itself. It only talks about the key management system surrounding it, and gives DES as an example of a scrambling algorithm that could be used for the data. This sill allows them to use another trade-secret algorithm, which is what they did.
Possibly the best thing to do at this point is to repeat the reverse engineering of CSS while paying careful attention to the trade secret and RE laws. Then publish that, along with a trail of evidence to show how the RE was done. However there is no getting around the fact that DeCSS, or any similar program, will still be in violation of this patent.
Does that mean that before DeCSS someone could have patented the CSS encryption method and screwed the motion picture industry?
Hmmm. You could certainly try. In fact ISTR that US patent law allows you a year after publication to patent the invention, so this is still open.
However it would not invalidate the current trade secret law suit, and I'm pretty certain that the current injunction would apply to publication by patenting. Once you have won the law-suit THEN you can go for the patent, assuming you haven't missed that 1 year deadline.
OTOH you might be able to use this as a bargaining counter. Point out to the MPAA that if they lose the suit then they will have to license CSS off you, rather than the other way around. Then offer a deal where they drop the lawsuit and injunctions in return for a free license or something.
Of course, IANAL, and if there is one thing a scheme like this needs, its a competent lawyer to look at it. There may well be something in trade secret law that blocks the whole idea.
IIRC, it was at one of the funfairs near New York. The elephant in question had killed a couple of keepers, and so had to be put down. So they made a spectacle out of it and called in Edison to tell them how to do it. There is a gruesome bit of B&W film of the electrocution. The elephant was connected up by leg irons. You see smoke from its feet, it sways, and collapses.
Its fairly high on my list of things I rather wish I hadn't seen.
I am, for various reasons, constrained to using Windows.
To stop this stuff, and also save on bandwidth, I use AtGuard. It filters cookies on a per-site basis, and also blocks access to URLs containing certain sub-strings (which can also be configured on a per-site basis). Overall a really cool and useful program which deserves to be far better known.
Unfortunately I've just discovered that WRQ (the creators of AtGuard) have sold the rights to Symantec, and its now part of Norton Internet Security 2000 for almost twice the price of just AtGuard. But you get a virus scanner as well. Ho hum.
My vote has got to be for the modern electricity distribution network. Electric power was avaliable in prototype form around the turn of the century, but it was very rare. Ordinary homes were lit by gas and heated by coal.
The key invention was the three-phase AC system by Tesla. Edison promoted the alternative DC system, with huge banks of lead-acid batteries at substations. Urgh. Continental electricity grids are only possible because of transformers to step up the voltage for long distance transmission, and transformers in turn only work with AC. If you use AC then the a three phase configuration is the most efficient.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, there are a number of smaller telcos who need you to dial prefix codes for long distance, and cable TV companies who also provide phone service and are starting to add cable modems.
On top of this we have Oftel, the telecoms regulator. They are mainly concerned with preventing BT from squashing any of the minnows. Their long-term goal is to nurture the competition to the extent that they no longer have to set BT's prices. Getting new technology into place is a secondary goal.
BT has been experimenting with and promising ADSL for a long time. They are just getting a trial service under way with some ISPs. Those who have it say it works great, but roll-out of the trials has not been terribly successful. BT have just extended the trial time. It is widely suspected that they don't want people to have high speed net access because this will lose BT its lucrative leased line market (ISTR a 64kbit line costs £1,000/month).
Oftel have commanded that BT open up their local loops by the middle of next year. At that point things should start moving.
Paul.
I am not a lawyer, still less a US constitutional lawyer, but surely this is not true. If the US government is spending money then it has to be used in a constitutionally valid way. I seem to recall that the recent case about school vouchers was decided on this issue: school vouchers were almost all being spent by parents to send their children to religiously based schools. Ergo the government was funding religion, and that is forbidden by the constitution.
If a link that tenuous can be held to be unconstitutional, what would the purchase of censorware for libraries be?
Paul.
I would have thought that these remarks are important enough to have been reported by someone else. There are supposed to have been enough journalists at the press conference.
Can anyone find anything on this subject which is not written by or based entirely upon the writings of Duncan Cambell?
Paul.
Paul.
Paul.
We've had the .com landgrab. Now watch out for the TLD landgrab. Everybody will want to own their own TLD, especially if they can charge every megacorp $50 to prevent someone else setting up www.megacorp.sucks, .evil, .blows, .lousy, .stupid, .hateit, .dumb, .cretin, .broken, .costalot, .tacky, ... Paul.
Today we have huge amounts of open-source software, but very little of it has been challenged on patent grounds. Even where such issues arise, they usually seem to be known about before the "infringing" software is written. The only minefield case I know of was the GIF patent, and even there the effect on the community was minimal because the owners behaved sensibly.
And in general patent holders will behave sensibly. In theory Megacorp could sue some innocent Joe into eternal insolvency over a single patent. In practice Megacorp knows that they will never recover even their legal fees, and the bad publicity will cost even more. If Joe is making money from the patent then they will want to come to some licensing deal that leaves Joe in business (no point killing the goose that lays the golden eggs), and if Joe is smart he will negotiate coverage by their patent umbrella as part of the deal. And if Joe is writing free software then litigation gains them absolutely nothing.
Yes, there are things that could be done to reform patents in general and software patents in particular, but the sky is not falling down.
Paul.
But there is also the "copyright" theory behind patents: that the patent is also a reward for the investment required to develop rifling. Your hypothetical musket maker might have had the lightbulb moment, but that is then followed by a long period of work to find out how to rifle barrels, how much rifling is necessary, what shape of bullet should be used, and all the other details behind rifle technology. If he knew that his competitors could copy his rifles and bullets at no charge then there would be no incentive to make the investment into discovering all the things that make rifles work.
On the other hand ISTR the "sweat of the brow" theory of patentability has been explicitly rejected. Merely having spent time doing research does not make something patentable. The novelty and non-obviousness are what counts.
I think that if we want to solve the problem with software patents then we are going to have to come up with an incremental fix to the system rather than revolutionary change. If the problem lies in a land-grab which ignores prior art then call for improved review of software patents and a higher hurdle. Ask that guidance be issued to courts on the subject of prior art, making patents easier to overturn (currently there seems to be a judicial bias in favour of patent office decisions). Don't demand that patents as a whole be abolished because it won't happen.
Paul.
To be precise, it is a breach of contract rather than a criminal issue. The police won't arrest the clerk, but if the MPAA gets wind of it then they will sue the clerk's employer, and the employer will fire the clerk.
Paul.
Sorry, I didn't make myself very clear. What I have in mind is that the copy mechanism would embed the watermark. In the case of a mass-produced CD the watermark would be the same for every copy, and would point to Mammoth Music Inc. But if you buy one of these CDs and make a private copy on your home CD burner then the new copy will have a different watermark pointing at you.
On the civil liberties front, this does not require that you register each piece of music in order to be able to play it. However it might require that you register your CD burner. Or the law could subpoena the source of the copy from whoever they caught holding it, and then verify the information by inspecting your equipment.
Paul.
There are two honest sides to this. On the one hand are the copyright owners who have a legitimate goal of reducing illegal copying at all levels. Unless we want to lobby for the total abolition of copyright on everything, I think that copy protection mechanisms are a legitimate goal.
On the other hand we have the consumer who wants to make fair use of purchased material. In the past both law-makers and courts around the world have been broadly supportive of fair use measures. The Sony vs United Media case is the one I've seen cited in the US, and I believe that similar rulings apply over here. For those unfamiliar with it, the court took the view that copyrights are not an absolute form of property, but a form of regulation designed to increase the production of creative works.
The judge in the DeCSS case made reference to this doctrine, but said that Congress should be given very broad lattitude by the courts in making such laws, since they had both the mandate and the information to make good ones. Hence the DMCA stands.
So I think we have to educate our lawmakers here. Acknowledge copy protection technology as a legitimate means to legitimate ends, but emphasise that these schemes give content produces an unprecedented degree of control over the end use of their products. This degree of control was probably not forseen by the lawmakers who voted for DMCA (I don't comment on those who actually wrote the clauses, or the companies who lobbied for it). Hence technological copy control should only be supported by the law where it permits fair use. We can emphasise this by demonstrating copy protection schemes which permit fair use. We are good at technology: that bit should be easy.
The problem with this is that "fair use" is very hard to pin down. The law surrounding it is complicated and varies between juristictions. This means that any copy protection scheme that tries to decide if a particular copy is legitimate before allowing the copy is not going to work. There is simply no way that a piece of software can make that decision.
The only other approach would seem to be some kind of detection after the fact. For instance, if every copy included a watermark of some kind in the encryption then it would be possible to track down the person who made the copy.
This scheme might be criticised on civil liberty grounds: if the government can track down the person who made a copy of something, they can equally track down the person who said something they don't like. But such a scheme would only apply to the copier of a protected work: anything you create yourself would not be watermarked in this way.
Of course there are a few grey areas. Fair use includes litrary criticism and similar excerpting. So what about a political activist who quotes a copy protected news report in the course of saying something the Government doesn't like? The creator of the copy could be tracked down. But for the vast majority of use I think this has to be the way to go.
Paul.
The South Sea Company stock was very popular, and prices went very high. The company had no immediate revenue stream, but once the war with Spain over South America was over the potential for future profit was thought to be huge. Alongside South Sea Comany came other companies hoping to cash in on the boom. The most remarkable was one which was "A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is".
The parallels with the Linux IPO situation are truly remarkable.
BTW, although there are no links here, you can type that phrase into Google for a number of short histories of the SSB.
Paul.
Not to any significant extent. Everyone knows that money attracts scam artists, so nobody is surprised to find that a few are sniffing around Linux now. This has no effect on the reputation of the rest of the Linux world. In fact it might even enhance it slightly: people have made a point of publicising suspected scams and warning potential investors off. This should increase confidence in the other enterprises.
Paul.
Probably won't work, at least not in that form. A UK court recently convicted a man under the Obscene Publications Act for a pr0n site which he created in the UK and then uploaded to servers in the US. The legal theory was that the act of publication occured in the UK because the upload and some downloads were both in the UK, and the physical location of the server was therefore irrelevant. I suspect that judges in other juristictions are going to think in similar ways.
Having said that, for free information the mirror reflex seems to work rather well. As soon as there is a threat of censorship hundreds of people in lots of juristictions grab copies and mirror it. DeCSS has gone this way, and other information will do so. So while it would be nice for anyone anywhere to own a pr0n site, the truth will still be out there mirrored on somebodies server.
Paul.
Its exactly this kind of crony capitalism that led to the crash of the Tiger Economies. In the UK we dropped the "national champion" approach to industrial policy when Mrs Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, and we are much better off as a result.
The problem with national champions is that they know they are too politically important to be allowed to fail. As a result they don't worry about running up losses because they know the government will bail them out. Sure, they can sometimes be success stories, but frequently they become economic millstones. UK readers who are old enough may remember the old British Leyland car makers. They were the national champions of UK industry during the 60s and 70s. It didn't take the unions there long to cotton on: the government wouldn't close them down or insist on layoffs because of the bad publicity, and hence they could strike for higher pay, shorter hours, or whatever else they wanted with complete disregard for anything else. BL became a byword for industrial strife, and the cars they made were famously bad.
Incidentally, while BL was destroyed by its unions, they are not the only thing that destroys national champions. The management can do just the same. Their primary cash flow comes from the government rather than their customers, and the government will still be there even if the customers go away. Hence their primary goal becomes pleasing the government rather than their customers. This problem is masked during the boom years because the company does not need to make unpopular layoffs, pay cuts or other measures. But when things turn down again, the management concentrate hard on extracting money from the government instead of becoming more competitive.
Remember the film "The Italian Job", a gold heist in Italy where three BL Minis were used as getaway cars? The film studio approached BL and asked if they could have the Minis in exchange for the valuable publicity. The BL middle-management thought about this and then turned them down. The reason was basically ass-covering. Saying "no" was the safe option. Saying "yes" could lead to Questions In Parliment about taxpayers money being wasted giving away cars to film companies. The extra sales that would result from people seeing the Mini as the perfect city car were irrelevant in this calculation.
Sooner or later, Taiwan Semiconductor is going to go the same way as British Leyland.
Paul.
The thing to read in patents is the Claims. Getting a patent is a bit like homesteading a piece of territory used to be: you stake your "Claim", and if nobody else has got it first then its yours.
Imagine how homesteading might have worked if there were no size limits and no need to "prove" the claim (in the sense of exploiting it all). You can stake your claim by putting four pegs in the ground: the perimiter defined by those pegs is your claim. However the claim is only valid if nobody else has put any of their pegs in that area first.
Patent claims work like a series of (mostly) concentric peg claims. Claim 1 pegs out the whole of Arkensas, but you don't really expect to get that one. Claim 2 pegs out the whole of Hazzard County, and you don't really expect to get that one either. Claim 3 pegs out 50 square miles, and you might get that one if you are lucky. Claims 4-6 are the most likely looking homesteads within claim 3, and claim 4 is where you actually start expecting to defend your property.
So, look at the claims on the patent, and figure out which ones are just restatements of prior art. For example in the DVD content scrambling patent, claim 1 pretty much describes any PRNG. Claim 2 probably covers a lot of cryptographic PRNGs (its not my field), and claims 7 and 8 cover the use of a PRNG number stream XORed with the data. So those claims would be covered by prior art and the MPAA is unlikely to contest them. They will concentrate on the later, more specific claims, such as the precise pattern of XORs in the PRNG.
So if I were writing a DVD descrambler routine I would try to come up with an algorithm which evaded the detailed claims, and forget about claims 1, 2, 7 & 8, and any others with textbook prior art. If you could show a standard textbook as prior art then I would expect the suit to be declared vexatious. But IANAL, of course.
Anyway, great book, great film.
Paul.
The early books are much less rich than the later ones, so don't give The Colour of Magic as a first book. Instead try any of Mort, Wierd Sisters or Guards Guards. Also don't forget his non diskworld books, especially the "Johnny" books and the Gnomes trilogy (aka "The Bromeliad"), which are aimed at younger readers.
For more details about TP, go to the fan site.
Paul.
Assuming that this algorithm is the real CSS one, then trade secret protection does not apply to it, and DeCSS can be distributed as long as it does not include any secret keys, and of course subject to any relevant patent laws.
BTW, IANAL.
Paul.
Interesting. A search for "Digital video disk" at the USPTO turned up Patent 5,883,958.
However this patent does not describe the CSS scrambling algorithm itself. It only talks about the key management system surrounding it, and gives DES as an example of a scrambling algorithm that could be used for the data. This sill allows them to use another trade-secret algorithm, which is what they did.
Possibly the best thing to do at this point is to repeat the reverse engineering of CSS while paying careful attention to the trade secret and RE laws. Then publish that, along with a trail of evidence to show how the RE was done. However there is no getting around the fact that DeCSS, or any similar program, will still be in violation of this patent.
Paul.
Hmmm. You could certainly try. In fact ISTR that US patent law allows you a year after publication to patent the invention, so this is still open.
However it would not invalidate the current trade secret law suit, and I'm pretty certain that the current injunction would apply to publication by patenting. Once you have won the law-suit THEN you can go for the patent, assuming you haven't missed that 1 year deadline.
OTOH you might be able to use this as a bargaining counter. Point out to the MPAA that if they lose the suit then they will have to license CSS off you, rather than the other way around. Then offer a deal where they drop the lawsuit and injunctions in return for a free license or something.
Of course, IANAL, and if there is one thing a scheme like this needs, its a competent lawyer to look at it. There may well be something in trade secret law that blocks the whole idea.
Paul.
IIRC, it was at one of the funfairs near New York. The elephant in question had killed a couple of keepers, and so had to be put down. So they made a spectacle out of it and called in Edison to tell them how to do it. There is a gruesome bit of B&W film of the electrocution. The elephant was connected up by leg irons. You see smoke from its feet, it sways, and collapses.
Its fairly high on my list of things I rather wish I hadn't seen.
Paul.
To stop this stuff, and also save on bandwidth, I use AtGuard. It filters cookies on a per-site basis, and also blocks access to URLs containing certain sub-strings (which can also be configured on a per-site basis). Overall a really cool and useful program which deserves to be far better known.
Unfortunately I've just discovered that WRQ (the creators of AtGuard) have sold the rights to Symantec, and its now part of Norton Internet Security 2000 for almost twice the price of just AtGuard. But you get a virus scanner as well. Ho hum.
Paul.
The key invention was the three-phase AC system by Tesla. Edison promoted the alternative DC system, with huge banks of lead-acid batteries at substations. Urgh. Continental electricity grids are only possible because of transformers to step up the voltage for long distance transmission, and transformers in turn only work with AC. If you use AC then the a three phase configuration is the most efficient.
Paul.